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Scott Shane

Scott Shane is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, where he has written about national security and other topics. More

Scott Shane is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, where he has written about national security and other topics.

His 2015 book, “Objective Troy: A Terrorist, A President and the Rise of the Drone,” examines the life and death of the late American-born radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011 at the orders of President Obama. It won the Lionel Gelber Prize, awarded each year to the best book in English on foreign affairs. In addition to the debate over terrorism and targeted killing, he has written on the Russian cyber attack on the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton and the intervention in Libya, Saudi influence on global Islam, the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden's leaked documents, WikiLeaks and confidential State Department cables, and the Obama’s administration’s prosecution of leaks of classified information. Other stories have explored interrogation and torture, the anthrax investigation, the government’s secret effort to reclassify historical documents and the explosion in federal contracting. His work with his colleagues at The Times has twice been a Pulitzer finalist: on interrogation in 2007 and on recruiting by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2015.

From 1983 to 2004, Mr. Shane was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, covering beats ranging from courts to medicine and writing articles on brain surgery, schizophrenia, a drug corner, guns and crime and other topics. He was Moscow correspondent from 1988 to 1991 and wrote a book on the Soviet collapse, “Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union,” which the Los Angeles Times described as “one of the essential works on the fall of the Soviet Union.” In 1995, he co-wrote a six-part explanatory series of articles on the National Security Agency, the first major investigation of the N.S.A. since James Bamford's 1982 book “The Puzzle Palace.” His series on a public health project in Nepal won the nation's top science-writing award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001.

Mr. Shane lives in Baltimore with his wife, Francie Weeks, who teaches English to foreign students. They have three children.